


Reclamation Studies

by VoluptuousPanic



Category: Star Trek: Picard
Genre: Angst, Family, Fluff, Gen, Narek (mention), OG Heartbreak, The Artifact, Work Wives
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-19
Updated: 2020-04-19
Packaged: 2021-03-02 05:41:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,703
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23740009
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VoluptuousPanic/pseuds/VoluptuousPanic
Summary: A series of related vignettes. Work and relaxation on the Artifact before things got weird. Rated M for grown up feelings and language.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 20





	Reclamation Studies

_Dr. Soji Asha. Personal Log._

_Today was the day that I’ve been waiting for since I first fell into the transwarp rabbit hole of interactions between psychotherapeutics and cybernetics. If my logs survive for posterity independent of my research or case notes regarding specific subjects, any reader would know that I’ve been thinking about these ideas for years. But actually being on the Artifact and finally interacting with its…resident population in therapeutic environment is really beyond my wildest dreams! Our worlds, inside the Federation, and the wide open spaces outside, dazzle with possibility, and the interactions between species in the diplomatic and technological realms are such fertile ground for development and cooperation and mutual evolution. It goes without saying that the psychological implications and moral quandaries of interspecies contact and collaboration lag behind discovery and advancement except in the narrow parameters of the Prime Directive and that it’s up to people like me—physicians, clinicians, counselors, social workers, good Samaritans of all stripes—to pick up the pieces left behind and sometimes stick them back together again. I know I’ve been going on about it for months, since I first heard about the possibility of this assignment and research opportunity, but being on the Artifact, and working with Borg and xBs, is the ideal place to look at all these intersections. This place where discovery and disaster live side by side, where unfettered development, conquest, and technological advancement that persisted in the complete moral vacuum of Borg assimilation is filled with such…human possibility. That’s probably the wrong word to use. I know it is._

_I met the Executive Director today. I’ve read his work, both clinical and political, for xB rights and Federation citizenship. I’ve read nearly everything that’s been written about him and his work. I’ve read the clinical and personal logs of physicians, geneticists, anthropologists, psychologists, psychopharmacologists, therapists who have worked with him both professionally and in the course of his own reclamation and rehabilitation. I wasn’t prepared for Hugh. He is simply Hugh, or Executive Director. I suppose that Executive Director, Dr. Hugh is more appropriate, but there too many words with that construction. I think of the immensity of his his presence, his…pedigree. Hugh is a living legend! And what I’m struck by when I think of him, the actual him, especially after introduction, initial discussion of research abstracts, and clinical frameworks today, is…how small he is and how his smile is a light in this dark place. I expected someone larger than life, someone authoritative and brusque. I expected to be shocked by his…xBness, the gravity of his experiences and remaining technical augmentation that can’t be removed. Hugh is small, and gentle, profoundly intuitive in facilitating connection, and appears genuinely delighted by opportunity to engage in clinical and intellectual discourse to benefit xBs. I should spare him my own clinical assessment, but he seems genuinely…well-adjusted and happy in most respects. He presents as complicated but unconflicted, and is obviously confident and exceedingly competent in his work. He is compassionate, funny, engaging, and inspires trust. He also has really, really great hair. That is also my clinical opinion._

_Hugh is also wary, understandably, of my intent. Of the intent of the other clinicians who arrived in our research group--doctors, therapists, bioengineers and biochemists, cyberneticists. He is especially calculating in his assessment of the relationships between attendant therapists and the work at hand, and we all…hit the ground running during orientation. I have trouble with names, but in the group that met with Hugh and a small group of xBs today, there are an another exo-anthropologist, two speech therapists, six physical therapists, two fine motor skills occupational therapists, and two other psychologists who work together, one a Betazoid and the other, Aenar. Their approaches are in profound opposition. And one of the xBs is also a clinician, and he…they? are Trill, both the symbiont and the host assimilated, which is a…total mindfuck. But the foundation of the work that Hugh and his working group has put into plan and action is mind boggling…. It is. I don’t even know. The immensity of this operation and the importance of the work makes me doubt myself. More than ever, I feel like an imposter, when I’m in a position of authority, a subject matter expert, Hugh’s peer. I look at him, at other high functioning xBs, at the Nameless who die during the process of reclamation or who cannot otherwise be deassimilated, and I see only a fraction of what their eyes have seen, what has happened to their minds, bodies…hearts. Souls. Spirits. And I also see how little comprises the sum of what is lauded as human experience, humanity, the essential experience of any race. And I am grateful that my introduction to the Artifact has come in the form of this small, gentle man who is warm, and kind, and so relatably…human. Is he human? Does he know? Does it matter? Does it matter what any of us are? Or are we all the sum of our parts?_

_What even makes us real?_

_End personal log._

* * *

“Review personal logs, clinical library, Dr. Erun Xoko-Ono Sopul. Just…computer, put it on my personal PADD. Temp access is okay. I just need a viewer.” Hugh won’t need it tomorrow. Possibly doesn’t need it now, but it helps every time a new group comes in. Calling home isn’t an option, because Hugh has never had one. What Ono offered was the closest, and she’s gone now and can’t be called. Hugh is operating on impulse really. Reaching out to Geordi would help, but Hugh remains courteous enough to schedule that time. And right now Hugh needs the reinforcement of family to reconnect with hope and focus again on the incremental progress in what can too easily be dismissed as futility, rather than the selfless encouragement provided by his oldest friend. It’s grounding he’s after, to feel how far he’s come, and who he is. Hugh.

“Affirmative, scheduling down—download complete.” The computer answers in a single voice, but shivers with the Hive. 

Hugh could reset preferences for his quarters and his office, make the voice cheerful, mimic the Federation default of divine femininity, or have it render affect-free simulated speech, but the singular voice of the Collective is grounding too. Hugh doesn’t even know how or why this is a feature. Perhaps the cube, the Artifact, has identified the need for a comms system and has adapted. Perhaps one of his cohort programmed it. Six had it too, in his quarters. They used to talk about it sometimes. Hugh supposes they still could. But Six has moved on and accepted another research assignment elsewhere, where he, like Hugh, will continue to study and be studied simultaneously. Hugh should send a message, schedule time to talk. Stop feeling sorry for himself about the things that never happened outside of those times in Unimatrix Zero so long ago. He could be sentimental and say they were just kids then. It was true, more or less. What was also true, more or less, was that after meeting in real life almost a decade later, he and Six weren’t cut out for that kind of connection. They were intimate colleagues, technological monastics with a mutual hunger for discourse and laughter and establishing a philosophical and academic framework for what they’d experienced. Hugh and “Six of Two.” 

Hugh felt himself shake with a small laugh that surprised him, distracted him from extracting his preferred sweet, milky tea from the replicator. He had been completely, wholly in his own head. The tea sloshed across the back of his hand, hot and wet. “I loved you, you fucking fuck. And you loved me,” he whispered aloud and felt the creep of a smile. He sighed away the familiar hollow in his chest that he knew was longing, mopped up the spill and set aside the kitchen towel along with those particular feelings. Service nanites would take care of one, but not the other. It was better this way anyway. The furthering, or deepening of anything with Six would have invited prying eyes, would have damaged their respective work. Spilt milk. Six had been away from the Artifact for better than a year, and still left message transmissions that felt ambiguous. Hugh still relied daily on Six’s helpful insistence to Connect: using words and action, behavioral repetition, and low-tech activities to disengage the programmed subroutines of the Collective. He thought of Six’s insistence on learning the primitive art of penmanship and how Six made PADD notes with a stylus. Hugh sighed again, not unhappily. Such a human action. He also thought of Six’s hands and the things they’d never done. Things no one had ever done. There was holo for that. But there was no time for holo.

There was really no time for anything now that intake had swelled to what felt like a flood, but Hugh remained rigorously scheduled. It was a necessity for post reclamation post rehab physiology. Sure, Hugh’s clunky old cortical node took up space in his left brain, and he had the option of upgrading, which would let him finally be rid of the cortical access points in his cheekbone and temple. But bone replacement was unnecessary and painful, though there was no longer the possibility of rejection due to disagreement between functioning nanites and new tissue, organic or synthetic. But he’d had enough, and there was already enough tech in his head with the cool new ocular implant, which would have to come out for a new cortical node to go in. He remembered a time when pain was irrelevant. But with age and experience came the realization that pain usually was relevant and rarely had any pay-off. Key to lessening pain and dealing with the body he had, and with the clunky cortical node that no longer interacted with regeneration alcoves, was regular sleep, with scheduled time to wind down, and to wake. Hugh preferred to get his reading in during these slots, in the morning at 0600 for business, in the evenings at 2100 for pleasure. Sometimes pleasure, like the political, was the purely personal. So was the decision to operate intake and assessment on Federation Standard Time. 

Hugh took his tea and the PADD to the sofa, where he sat for the first time since breakfast that morning in the mess hall with the new Dr. Asha. Soji. Being on his feet all day was normal, almost as normal as it was in the Collective. He’d had dinner standing at the mess counter with Dr. Vatri. But increasingly, Hugh’s back and hips were as clunky as the cortical node. Age wasn’t something the Collective had ever considered, and the aged, like the irreparably sick or injured, were simply neutralized. Hugh sometimes entertained the idea that he might now indeed be the oldest drone, in or out of the Collective, but he wasn’t entirely certain. Just as there was new tech emerging for the cosmetic concerns of reclamation, there was new tech readily available to replace or upgrade degrading musculoskeletal and connective tissue, Romulan-made tech that was highly compatible, thanks to Reclamation Science. Hugh was resistant. But his knees, so far, were okay, and he curled up easily, cross-legged and pajamaed, and swiped the PADD screen to access Ono’s logs. Soji had mentioned Ono at breakfast, how she’d begun preparing for her own work with xBs and the Reclamation Project by familiarizing herself with Ono’s work, and her subjects. But Soji didn’t, Hugh knew, have access to Ono’s private notes. 

_“Clinical log, first meeting. My patient is…Third of Five. He calls himself Hugh. His individuation and sense of self seem more developed than those of the other captured drones.”_

“Ono, we surrendered,” Hugh answered the projection with a smile and a surge of emotion that made him rub at his eyes with a sleeve. He reached out to the projection and brought his hand back with the knowledge that the fizz of electrons along his skin would never let him touch Ono’s warmth or her wondrous crown of braids. 

_“Subject is humanoid, male, adolescent, undernourished and slightly built. Estimated age is 16 to 19 years. Medial clavicular epiphysis has not yet occurred. Likely human, though there are chromosomal abnormalities likely due to assimilation process and ongoing nanite activity at the genome level that prevent confirmation. Subject is docile and observant, highly verbal, curious and inquisitive. Appears to care for and is respected by other members of his subject cohort, and expresses concern for their wellbeing. He is bright and adaptive, and has easily surpassed the expected metrics for the cognitive exercises used to assess his condition. He is responding well to the gene therapy begun in the facility at E-2, and his organic systems are beginning to disengage with biomechanical and cybernetic implants and enhancements. Dr. Targa has agreed to take under advisement the idea that a more controlled therapeutic and observational environment, such as a residential treatment and rehabilitation center, may be necessary to the pursuit of deassimilation of Borg. I am interested in taking necessary steps to ensure that Hugh be the first candidate for the recommended rehabilitation protocol.”_

* * *

“But what was Ono like?” Soji asked with no pause in her elation for Hugh to answer. “She was a legend in childhood and adolescent trauma psychology in conflict zones and then made a total pivot to pioneer Reclamation Psychology. And all because of you.” She stopped speaking for a large bite of toast though her eyes remained alight and focused on Hugh. 

He felt naked, but pleasantly so. It was unusual for new staff or visiting clinicians to take interest beyond further research, and Hugh was used to being a means to that end. And he was deeply cognizant that in both theory and practice, he was too close to the subject matter. Other specialists were sometimes decidedly free with offering that assessment, but it was what Hugh had to work with. He was learning in the present instance, however, that Soji’s professional strength was connection, and that it was genuine. It was the same approach he saw her use with the xBs in her dialectical and cognitive groups, only highly personal. Being spoken to like a friend was not unpleasant. Hugh offered a roll of organic eye—one of the few expressive perks of a bifurcated face—and a smirk that made Soji laugh. He paused for a sip of coffee, pleased with the ease of conversational pacing. “Ono was a difficult person. And she was very, very good at helping people become who they were—are.” 

Soji smiled with a curious tilt of her head that Hugh had seen before, though he still couldn’t place it. It had bugged him for days, something filed away, somewhere long ago in the places he looked only when he had the luxury of time to organize himself. 

“What,” Soji asked, “would Ono say about your work? And what you’re doing?” She pointed at him with her fork for emphasis.

Hugh sighed. The answer to Soji’s question was something he thought of often, but in the abstract. He leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms, suddenly feeling very small and very young again. He chose his words carefully. A glib answer would dishonor Ono and their relationship. He didn’t want to put words in her mouth. “I think,” he said slowly, “that Ono would be very proud of me. But also critical of some of the choices that I’ve had to make out of necessity.” He faced those choices daily. Chiefly, serving highly classified Romulan interests that made for need-to-know inconsistencies.

“And…?

“And,” Hugh lowered his voice. “And she would be horrified by some of the directions that…things…have had to go to maintain this project. How secretive operations are. That for all the good that has come of this, there isn’t a great deal of transparency regarding the Romulans’ intentions regarding the people—the xBs—who inhabit the Artifact.” 

“What else?” Soji asked, leaning forward conspiratorially. The effect was utterly disarming. “You’ve talked about work. You’ve been serious. We’re serious all day. What would she say about you, Hugh?”

Hugh shrugged and shook his head. Again, he chose his words carefully. “She would tell me I needed to eat more. She would hate this uniform.” He hated the uniform too, that it was comfortable and fit well by design, that its engineering interacted with the Artifact and his own. Sometimes, it felt too familiar. Hugh blinked and collected himself, made a grimace as he brought his head back to Ono and Soji. “And she would consider it a personal failing that I’m alone in the world with nothing but my work. That I have yet to transcend what I am.” He muttered the brutal truth with a melancholy grin.

“You’ve never been in love either, huh?” Soji asked with a smile that shone across her whole face. 

Hugh shook his head, unable to resist offering a real smile in return. He felt, in that moment, that nothing would make him happier than Soji’s desire to be his friend. 

She tilted her head again. “I’m talking about relationships with an xB. With the xB.”

“And…?”

Soji sighed and returned her fork to her tray. She took her mug in both hands for a long sip of tea, seeming to gather her thoughts. “Nothing about any of this is what I expected. The grim realities. How horrible our peers can be. Romulan beaurocracy. Therapeutic dead ends. False starts. Wasting and declining cognitive function. The Disordered. Horror. And my patients. Patients who make the informed decision to sever from the Collective when they know that their choice will eventually be fatal. Incremental progress. Unexplained leaps in motor or cognitive rehabilitation. The delight I see sometimes. Heti and her beautiful plants. When someone smiles, or laughs, or remembers something. Or needs to tell a story. Or a joke. The fact that Brada is a total dick who wants to be plugged back in, and we would, but the ethics… And you! You have no idea who you are to them.” Soji beamed and reached across the table to touch his arm. 

Hugh felt a rush of warmth as his face flushed. “I’m not a yardstick, Soji. I was just lucky.” Decades of luck. The right places. The right times. Ends and solutions that were acceptable rather than devastating, even if not wholly desirable outcomes. Consistency, therapeutic stability, safe spaces, and sometimes—he believed—love. Inexplicable foundations that were there for Hugh, despite the oppression, violence, ill will, and fetishization that he and his people faced. It was almost enough to tempt Hugh toward belief in divine intervention or intelligent design, except that the logical conclusion of intelligent design was synthetic life, which was now impossible, though he and other xBs were halfway there. But it was, simply, luck.

“I know. I feel like an imposter too. But that doesn’t mean we are.” 

“Thank you,” Hugh said, aware of his own wonder that anyone as bright and beautiful as Soji could ever doubt herself. Beyond compassion for their existence, he hadn’t given much thought, ever, to the doubts of others, except as thoughts that held them back. The same as his own doubts held him back. It was one of the first things he had learned from Ono. If a thought, feeling, or pattern—or a subroutine—didn’t serve, or actively undermined, it wasn’t valuable. He could hear Ono now: _take it, look at it, feel the way it feels and what it touches, figure out what it protects you from experiencing, let it go, and forgive yourself for feeling it. And remember that other people must do exactly the same._ Clearly, Soji deserved that consideration, too. 

Soji squeezed his arm in answer, then resumed her breakfast. “I like you very much,” she said, industriously dismantling a large piece of segmented fruit that appeared to Hugh to be some type of citrus but none that he’d encountered, even via the infinite variety of the replicator. Soji looked up and grinned again. “I didn’t expect that either. I didn’t expect you to have time for me.”

“I don’t ever expect anyone to like me,” Hugh confessed. It was a simple fact. Deciding to literalize living without expectations was something that Ono would chastise him for too. The same as not eating enough, though Hugh knew well enough how to keep himself nourished, yet eating remained an always slightly weird, and sometimes overly sensual necessity that he scheduled like sleep now that regeneration was no longer possible.

Soji gestured at the fruit. “So let’s do this since since there’s nowhere to go. Help me eat this. Whatever it is.”

* * *

_Dr. Soji Asha. Personal log._

_I would be mad at Hugh if I didn’t know he was right. I’m still mad at Hugh. I’m mad that he’s right, and that he’s so gentle and professionally astute when he says no. I’m mad at myself for pestering him. That was the word he used. I need to talk to Ramdha. The discussions I’m having with Dr. Vatri regarding myth building in cognitive processing keep leading me back to her. There’s something happening here, a pattern, and it feels…Romulan. The disorder of the Artifact is inextricably connected to the Disordered. And so is the fact that xBs adrift from other cubes arrive in a trickle, all with the same distress signal, the same codes. I need to talk to Ramdha, but I don’t know the questions to ask. And I’m mad because I know that’s why Hugh is doing what’s right by standing in the way. I just can’t…be mad at him._

_I need to be better organized to file a formal request. It’s a query that needs to be approached through specific methodology to test a hypothesis, and my task as a psychologist is to make a decision about that methodology and be prepared to defend its application to a subject. And my human failing is that I want to go to my friend who calls the shots and say ‘please let me talk to this person so I can discover a great mystery.’ Our friendship probably isn’t even ethical, but things are so weird out here and I want to call my sister to ask her what she thinks and I can’t. Because what goes on here is classified. What happens on the Artifact stays on the Artifact. For now at least._

_I think I’m also mad that Hugh isn’t a window to everything with the xBs. I shouldn’t expect him to be. He could jack in any day, but he’s been severing himself from the Collective longer than I’ve been alive. He’s been completely independent from the hive for longer than he was Borg. I’m reminded every day that I am so young, and that my work until now has been largely theoretical, and that working with living, breathing subjects is fundamentally different than academic simulations, even holo hypos with an open algorithm. I keep returning to Ono’s case notes about Hugh and the Weller Institute files on Norken Six, looking for the answers, and the pattern doesn’t hold. The efficacy of assessment and treatment protocol is undeniable, and the behavioral patterns of almost all subjects who experience successful intervention are similar. Except the Disordered, who are only Romulan. There’s something, and it’s…it’s right there, and I can’t figure it out. It’s like there’s a piece missing. And because I’m a scientist, I’m responsible for finding it, and in a specific way._

_The sidebar is that it’s hard reading about Hugh as a clinical subject, viewing case notes and studies now that I know him. He was so young and so lost, and his story and clinical progress are the foundations of Reclamation Studies. I wonder how this is ethical, and I sometimes think the point is that it’s not. Just like the ethics of any other deprogramming are sometimes murky. But I can see that little boy lost when Hugh talks about Six. It’s clear that there was something there, beyond their research partnership. If it was anyone but Hugh, I would be merciless. But I can’t. Just like I can’t be mad at him for protecting Ramdha. The loyalty here is palpable, and nothing about it is self-serving or disingenuous. It is what maintains the Collective, even after severance. The Collective is full of the kind of secrets that engender religion, philosophy, mythology, and it is entirely shared, a closed network. I think Ramdha is key to understanding and opening it._

* * *

“Have you seen him?” Soji asked, nearly vibrating with enthusiasm and humor, and something that sounded, to Hugh, a little like fear. 

Hugh knew immediately who she meant, though the redirect of their conversation had been sudden. He couldn’t help but grin too, because he had seen the subject of Soji’s diversion, and a little also because of the wine that Soji had plied him with. Hugh didn’t usually care for intoxicants, but somehow sitting in his quarters with Soji watching Romulan Snakehead and Warbird tactical drills on a projection of the Command view while mildly numbed and overly full was comforting. They could have watched a holo, but most were full of too many opportunities to assess and diagnose the narrative. Instead, they did this together, winding down the night before any scheduled R&R that fell on the same day. The wine was new. So was the Romulan. 

“Handsome? Dashing? Brooding?” Hugh asked without making eye contact, his head lolling on the sofa back. He was unable to resist letting his field of view roll away from the projection or the smile from stealing across his face as he turned his head to look at Soji. He laughed at her pantomime of mute human desire, all wide green eyes, and hand to mouth with mock surprise. How close desire, fear, and repellence lived to each other. Hugh still found it endlessly fascinating. The Romulan was fascinating too. 

Soji nodded, returning to herself and the projection, with a last sip of wine. “Run of the mill creep or Tal Shiar?” she asked sardonically. 

“Either option makes him a piece of shit,” Hugh laughed. He passed Soji the dregs of his glass and watched her drain it. 

“Oh, he is such bad news.” Soji sighed. “Making bad decisions about desire and where to put feelings is such a universal of attachment-based mating experience. We’ve come so far, in all our civilizations, and this is still the central experience of attraction. Will he look really amazing while being absolutely horrible? Sign me up!” She leaned her head on his shoulder. 

Hugh was powerless to resist tilting his head to Soji's, to smell her hair and feel strangely warm when she slid her arm across his belly, heedless of the vestiges of implants that he knew she knew marked his abdomen. And he knew that if things were different, if he were different, now would be the time to make a move. He thought of Six, and how badly it had gone the time he had made a move for that most essential experience of human connection. In comparison, Hugh knew what he felt for Soji wasn’t desire. He suspected he’d feel that in his life only once, and that ship had sailed long ago with Six’s tender rebuff. This, that Hugh felt now, was why he didn’t like intoxicants. It wasn’t about xB physiology at all. It was about being human. He expected it was the same for Soji. 

“Hugh,” Soji said. “When you meet someone who cares for you and respects you and wants to protect you, you grab onto him and don’t let go. You deserve that.”

“Only if you do the same," Hugh exhaled. “What if he’s Romulan?” he whispered, suddenly feeling absurdly conspiratorial again as an array of phaser fire lit the display. That was the wine, too. 

Soji giggled and squeezed him. “Oh Jesus, Hugh. Then you’re fucked. Just like I am.”

**Author's Note:**

> Giving these two a minute together was wholly unintended. This started as a character study for some deep play with Hugh/Elnor, and turned into its own thing wherein Hugh revealed himself as unexpectedly flexible with regard to attraction.


End file.
